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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/17/16

With high-priced pitching options on the board, you'll need to find ways to save salary. The Pittsburgh Pirates could help you in that pursuit.

Stacking can be a controversial topic in many daily fantasy sports, but you can count baseball as a glaring exception. Here, it's universal.

Using multiple players on the same team on a given day presents you with the opportunity to double dip. If one of your players hits an RBI double, there's a good chance he drove in another one of your guys. When you get the points for both the run and the RBI, you'll be climbing the leaderboards fast.

Each day here on numberFire, we'll go through four offenses ripe for the stacking. They could have a great matchup, be in a great park, or just have a lot of quality sticks in the lineup, but these are the offenses primed for big days that you may want a piece of.

Premium members can use our new stacking feature to customize their stacks within their optimal lineups for the day, choosing the team you want to stack and how many players you want to include. You can also check out our hitting heat map, which provides an illustration of which offenses have the best combination of matchup and potency.

Now, let's get to the stacks. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Pittsburgh Pirates

We're now four starts into Aaron Blair's time with the Atlanta Braves, and things haven't quite caught hold just yet. He has only struck out 7 of 83 batters while walking 11, and to say that ratio is less than ideal would be a criminal understatement. The Pittsburgh Pirates have an offense that can exploit it.

Blair was a big-time strikeout guy this year in Triple-A prior to his promotion, getting that third strike 31.9% of the time. All of that has disappeared in the majors, though, as his 8.4% strikeout rate is backed up by a 6.9% swinging-strike rate and an 83.9% contact rate. When you're putting that many base runners on and then giving them extra-base upside with a 39.1% ground-ball rate, it can lead to big run totals in a hurry. The park isn't ideal, but it'll work when the matchup is this skewed toward the offense.

You'll have to work hard today to find value with all of the high-priced pitching options, but the Pirates do have a couple of sticks who can provide that. David Freese likely won't be at third base after Jung Ho Kang got the day off yesterday, but he could end up at first to give John Jaso a breather. That would be a tremendous spot for Freese at his price. The other would be Matt Joyce, who did this again last night.

His batted-ball numbers aren't going to blow you away, but he should be at a decent spot in the order to capitalize on Blair's issues. With Starling Marte on the paternity list, Joyce may get another start, and that would give you additional flexibility to pay up elsewhere.

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